Virtuous cycle of creativity

The combination of blogs and aggregation is so powerful not justbecause these are complementary technologies in the obvious sense, butbecause they promote a 'virtuous cycle' that promotes the creationa andtransformation of information.   Of course this cycle isnothing new -- it's been around since forever, through the media ofbooks, libraries, universities, newspapers, et cetera -- but theblog/aggregation combination vastly speeds up the process and reducesthe transaction cost to effectively nothing.  Which makes the Long Tail of the information economy accessible.

That's why the announcement of My MSN RSS aggregation with feed search is interesting; a My MSN aggregator, plus MSN Spacesmeans Microsoft can leverage both sides.  So they could make itvery easy, for example, to subscribe to the RSS feeds for Spaces ownedby people who comment on your blog.  Or do any number of otherthings which increase the value of being an MSN member.  And,obviously, these tools still interoperate with the rest of theblogosphere (note that Spaces has had RSS feeds since launch).

Spam spam spam spam...

Back in June, aparently, the FTC said that a do-not-email list (likethe do-not-call list) would not work, and would generate more spambecause spammers would use it as a source of new email addresses. Though it's a bit late now, I have to wonder about the latterpoint.  Why not simply map each address into its MD5 checksumbefore storing it?

So foo@example.com would become "a0b6e8fd2367f5999b6b4e7e1ce9e2d2"which is useless for sending email.  However, spammers could use any of many available toolsto check for "hits" on their email lists, so it's still perfectlyusable for filtering out email addresses.  Of course it would alsotell spammers that they have a 'real' email address on their list, butonly if they already had it -- so I don't think that would be givingthem much information at all.

I still think the list would be useless because spammers would simplyignore it.  But it wouldn't generate new spam, and it would driveup the cost of spamming by making the threat of legal action a bit morepossible.

The Noosphere Just Got Closer

Of course it'll take several years, but Google's just announced project to digitize major university library collections means that the print-only "dark matter" of the noosphereis about to be mapped out and made available to anyone with an Internetconnection.  Well, at least the parts that have passed into thepublic domain; the rest will be indexed.

I'm clearly a geek -- my toes are tingling.

The "5th Estate"

Interesting quote, from my point of view, in this article:

Jonathan Miller, Head of AOL in the US, testifies to the popularity ofCitizen's Media. He says that 60 - 70 per cent of the time people spendon AOL is devoted to ‘audience generated content'.

(Though he's talking mostly about things like message boards and chat rooms, of course, rather than blogs.)

Welcome MSN Spaces!

A surprise to welcome me back from sabbatical: Microsoft released the beta of MSN Spaces(congratulations guys!).  I've been playing with it a bit over thepast few days; there's some very cool stuff there, especially theintegrations between Microsoft applications. 

(I've seen a few comments about the instability of the Spaces service; come on folks, it's a beta.  And they're turning around bug fixes in 48 hours while keeping up with what has got to be a ton of traffic.)

The Atom Publishing Protocol Summarized

The slidesfrom Joe Gregorio's XML 2004 talk about the Atom Publishing Protocolare online.  It's an excellent summary, and makes a good case forthe document literal and addressable web resource approaches.  Thepublishing protocol is where Atom really starts to get exciting.

Software Patents Considered Harmful

This post by Paul Vick is, I think, a very honest and representative take on software patents -- and in particular the over-the-top IsNot patent -- from the point of view of an innovator.  I find myself agreeing with him wholeheartedly:

Microsoft has been as much a victim of this as anyone else, and yetwe're right there in there with everyone else, playing the game. It'sbecome a Mexican standoff, and there's no good way out at the momentshort of a broad consensus to end the game at the legislative level.

And we all know how Mexican standoffs typically end.  Paul, myname is on a couple of patents which I'm not proud of either.  Butin the current environment, there really isn't a choice: We're alllocked in to locally 'least bad' courses, which together work toguarantee the continuation of the downward spiral (and in the long run,make all companies worse off -- other than Nathan Myhrvold's, of course.)